what money he needed and let him go.  So Russell started on his journey over the sea.  He worked his way on a cattle steamer from New York to Liverpool.  But it was a homesick boy that roamed around in foreign lands, and as he has said most feelingly since, “I felt that if I could only get back home, I would never, never leave it again.”  He did not stay abroad long and when he returned to his home, his father greeted him as if he had been absent a few hours, and never in any way, by word or action, referred to the subject.  In fact, so far as Martin Conwell appeared, Russell might have been no farther than Huntington.

Thus boyhood days passed with their measure of work and their measure of play.  He lived the healthy, active life of a farm boy, taking a keen interest in the affairs of the young people of the neighborhood, amusing the older heads by his mischievous pranks.  He diligently and perseveringly studied in school hours and out.  He read every book he could get hold of.  He was sometimes disobedient, often intractable, in no way different from thousands of other farm boys of those days or these.

But the times were coming which would test his mettle.  Would he continue to climb as he had done after the eagle’s nest, though compelled many times to go to the very ground and begin over again?

Would the experiences of life transmute into pure gold, these undeveloped traits of character or prove them mere dross?  It rested with him.  He was the alchemist, as is every other man.  The philosopher’s stone is in every one’s hands.

CHAPTER VI

OUT OF THE HOME NEST

School Days at Wilbraham Academy.  The First School Oration and Its Humiliating End.  The Hour of Prayer in the Conwell Home at the Time of John Brown’s Execution.

The carefree days of boyhood rapidly drew to a close.  The serious work of life was beginning.  The bitter struggle for an education was at hand.  And because one boy did so struggle, thousands of boys now are being given the broadest education, practically free.

Russell had gone as far in his studies as the country school could take him.  Should he stop there as his companions were doing and settle down to the work of the farm?  The outlook for anything else was almost hopeless.  He had absolutely no money, nor could his father spare him any.  He knew no other work than farming.  It was a prospect to daunt even the most determined, yet Russell Conwell is not the only farmer’s boy who has looked such a situation in the face and succeeded in spite of it.  Nor were helping hands stretched out in those days to aid ambitious boys, as they are in these.